Live data streaming of Alibaba's Singles Day sale on November 11, 2014.

This is the sixth year that Alibaba hosted the 24-hour sale, which always begins at midnight on November 11th and takes place mainly on its branded products retail site Tmall and Taobao market place. The amount of transaction recorded has grown exponentially, a result of the strength of China’s internal consumption demand and Alibaba’s ever-larger clout within China’s e-commerce space.

"The key thing you are seeing is the unleashing of the consumption power of the chinese consumers,” said Joseph Tsai, the executive vice chairman of Alibaba Group at a media briefing today. "China has been an economy that’s driven by exports and investments. We are really seeing the shift of the economy from one that focused on the state sector to consumption [by] everybody on the street.”

An overwhelming bulk of the day’s transactions was processed on Aliyun, the cloud computing platform that Alibaba began to develop in 2009, the first year that the Singles Day sale was launched. A record number of 70,000 orders were processed per second on the platform , according to COO Daniel Zhang, and there was not a single case of buyers being allowed to place more orders than what was offered by the merchants.

The shift to shopping on mobile devices was a challenge for Alibaba’s technology platform and big data strategy. Mobile users visited the site at a higher frequency, Zhang pointed out, which not only generated additional traffic but also required the site to stay updated with better-targeted merchandises.

"Limited by the screen size, shopping through mobile devices is a [very] different experience compared to that on PCs,” said Charlie Chen, a market analyst at IDC China. “Comprehensive and a large volume of shopping information is no longer appropriate to deliver through the mobile platform.” Giving precisely customized merchandise recommendation would be a focus of Alibaba’s future efforts, Zhang noted in his concluding remarks for the Singles Day sale.

Besides mobile growth, going global was also a notable theme at this year’s sale, with AliExpress and Tmall Global participating to allow customers abroad to make purchases from Chinese merchants and vice versa.

"Going global is one point of experimentation this year,” said Alibaba Chairman Jack Ma to FORBES. “We would like to prepare for all-out internationalization three to five years down the road. The purpose is to enable small companies and consumers all over the world to buy and sell online one day.”

Whereas for AliExpress, the biggest foreign customer was clearly Russia, where the business' Russian-language site ranked No.1 among all e-commerce sites. In fact last year, Singles Day was so popular that delivery paralyzed Russia’s logistics system, prompting an inquiry from the Russian government (the brutal winter was partly to blame).

It will be a while before Singles Day could have any serious prospect of becoming a global phenomenon though. The overall global sales is likely to be very small compared to the total amount, Alibaba executives suggested. Despite the company’s rising fame overseas, largely thanks to its high-profile U.S. IPO, the company is cautious about replicating its business models beyond China's borders.

“Going global must be a step-by-step process. There’s no way to accomplish it in just one step,” said Tsai. “Chinese companies going abroad must adapt to the market based on local cultures, norms and business models. We cannot repeat the mistakes that other multinationals have already made.”